From coffee houses to climate models: 250 years of American insurance

On a spring morning in 1752, a group of Philadelphians led by Benjamin Franklin sat down and did something that, in retrospect, looks a great deal like inventing an industry. They pooled their money into a mutual company, the Philadelphia Contributionship, and promised to rebuild each other’s homes if fire ever took them. It was a modest, almost neighborly idea – insurance as a covenant among people who knew each other. Nearly 275 years later, that same impulse to pool risk underwrites a domestic market that, as of 2023 (the most recent verified figure), accounted for roughly 45% of the $7.2 trillion in insurance premiums written worldwide that year, according to Swiss Re figures cited in Wikipedia’s overview of insurance in the United States. More current totals almost certainly exist but I was not able to verify a more recent figure, so treat this as directional rather than up to the minute. The story of how the country got from there to here is, in miniature, the story of the American economy itself: its fires, its wars, its migrations, its financial crises, and – increasingly – its climate.